A wide variety of industrial applications require access to man-made transport conduits in order to safely and efficiently practice associated technologies. For example, liquid and gas transportation services, utilities, communications and power installations, fiber optics, and slurry and water transportation facilities all require pipeline access in order to carry out their various operations.
Other technical fields requiring pipeline installations include oil and gas exploration and production. However, many potential oil and gas exploration and production sites are significantly constrained by environmental regulations and other special circumstances that make transportation, installation and maintenance of pipeline equipment difficult or impossible to readily achieve.
For example, oil and gas reserves are often found in terrain with near-surface water accumulations, such as swamps, captive lakes, estuaries, shorelines, and permafrost regions. In the case of swamps, the ground is generally too soft to safely support trucks and other heavy equipment required to deliver and install pipeline trenching and support equipment. Captive lakes are also troublesome, especially when disposed between terminal points of a pipeline installation; in such cases, the pipeline generally has to be re-routed around the lake, which greatly increases the complexity and expense of the operation. Near estuaries and shorelines, the associated land-to-water interface is often unsuitable for supporting pipeline installation equipment, while in permafrost regions, installation of heavy equipment is supportable only during certain months of the year, viz., those winter months when the ground surface is securely frozen. In still other regions, for example, near gorges and canyons, interfering terrain features often effectively preclude cost-efficient drilling and production of oil and gas reserves.
Under cities and towns, the technical aspects of pipeline installation and maintenance are generally more straightforward, since associated ground surfaces are usually firmer and more capable of supporting multiple conduit and infrastructure installations than wilderness regions; however, costs associated with rights of way and competition for shared physical resources can greatly diminish the value of a prospective pipeline operation. Conversely, shoreline regions often pose significant construction and maintenance challenges for pipeline operations, and environmental constraints can significantly impact the location of a pipeline route and the means by which it is installed and maintained.
Many regions in which oil and gas reserves are disposed are also environmentally sensitive, and surface access by heavy transport vehicles can seriously damage the underlying terrain and/or affect wildlife breeding areas and migration paths. Such problems are particularly acute in arctic tundra and permafrost regions, where road construction is often prohibited or limited to temporary seasonal access, and operations are frequently encumbered by wildlife and regulatory concerns.
Wherever a well is drilled and produced, the resulting oil and gas must eventually be transported from the wellhead to either a storage or transportation facility. Currently, the most common method of transporting oil and gas is by means of a pipeline. Under normal circumstances, pipelines are run above ground and affixed to a series of braces set in trenches dug into a ground surface. Other pipelines, including those that run shorter distances under obstacles such as buildings or rivers, are typically carried out by either tunneling operations or horizontal drilling technology. Tunneling operations, however, are much more expensive and complicated than trenching technology, and thus pipelines are generally disposed above surface trenches whenever possible.
Since tunneling is generally the most expensive and complicated fluid transport solution, and since the setting of trenches in premium locations sought by drillers and explorers is often prohibitively difficult and expensive to achieve, there is presently a widespread need for a system and method of installing and maintaining a pipeline that is independent of both trenching and tunneling technologies, and especially for a system and method that avoids trenching and tunneling while minimizing disturbance to associated ground surfaces during pipeline installation and maintenance operations.